


Bring out your dead

by Amand_r



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M, book fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-26
Updated: 2010-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-17 07:50:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/174562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Zero's mum picks him up at intergalactic lost and found (a.k.a. the Cardiff Rift), and Jack has his little hair-raising adventure, he can't kiss Ianto without a shock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bring out your dead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lullabelle](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=lullabelle).



> Written for the Torchwood Book Fic Fest. The book is The Undertaker's Gift
> 
> Thanks to heddychaa and neifile7 for looking at it with beta eyeballz JESUS!, and to cruentum for organizing and hosting the exchange AKA taking one for the team and volunteering to have JB's assbabies.

_Mertis a moti e chest a gron tu_  
Saing saing sa ( saing saing sa )  
Mi af marka dia on di eva green.  
\--Yoko Kanno/Gabriela Robin, 'Green Bird'

After Zero's mum picks him up at intergalactic lost and found (a.k.a. the Cardiff Rift), and Jack has his little hair-raising adventure, he can't kiss Ianto without a shock. It's just as well, really. Jack's nerves are dead, he says, even if his senses and limbs aren't. He says that every time he comes back to life he's exactly as he was, that time, when it happened.

Ianto knows that's not always true—otherwise Jack wouldn't have tolerated that mess that was his leg and the wheelchair back when they had had their horrible date at the zoo gone awry. Ianto had even suggested it once—why not just snuff yourself to save a painful convalescence, then? Jack had muttered that time was a bitter mistress and left it at that.

If there is one thing that Ianto is good at (and he likes to think there are several, sometimes myriad), it is not prying. Well, openly. The best blackjack is an invisible one, and Ianto's is fashioned from fingertips on keyboards and the lick of a wetted thumb flipping quickly through musty files. The niceties and formalities of maintaining a hands-off, aloof persona are well-slathered into his being, not unlike waking up after falling asleep on one's sweater and finding the imprint of the knit on the skin.

Indeed, secrets are best discovered by oneself, at night, possibly whilst digging through the trash, or rifling through a medicine cabinet under the guise of a loo break, or even--

'That's way too long to be huffing a man's shorts,' Jack says from behind him, and Ianto starts, shoving the last of Jack's dirty clothes into the Hub's ancient wring washer. He dumps the pre-measured cup of powder in and slides the lid shut, the roundness of it reminding him of other holes into which he's tossed Jack's things.

'You're perved,' he says, but what he really wants to say is that this is as close as he can get to Jack and not short-circuit his own nervous system. Kissing Jack right now is not unlike licking a socket. Actually, he doesn't know what that feels like, so he gropes in his head for something else: there--touching a live electric fence with a blade of grass. Like that. Jack makes his metal fillings rattle.

Jack leans against the wringer and flips the switch, and the rollers grind to a start, working around and around, cracked rubber surfaces turning like a honky-tonk automated piano roll. Ianto wonders what tune it would play if it had access to a needle: "Tonight's The Night", perhaps, or "Tempted" by The Squeeze.

He holds up a hand, the other one still firmly in his trouser pockets. 'Dare me?' he asks, waggling his fingers and sticking them dangerously close to the rollers.

Ianto rolls his eyes and sets the laundry basket in the corner, under the the chute that dumps Jack's clothes right down here. 'You're an idiot.'

'Hey, I'm still your boss.'

'You're an idiot, sir.'

Jack grins and turns the rollers off. 'That's more like it. Subordinate insubordination.'

The washer is full now and starts to turn inside. The thing is on wheels, but the violence of the agitation is so forceful that Ianto had cement-blocked it in place ages ago. He kicks one of the blocks back in place; the Hub washer, like its inhabitant, can't be restrained by mere cement. Well, Ianto has never seen Jack trapped in cement, but he imagines that if he ever were, all one would have to do would be crack it open like Zeus's head and Jack would burst out, fully grown.

'Are we ever going to talk about it?' Jack's voice is soft and almost like a shrug; it says, "If you want to we can. Or, you know, meh."

'I wasn't huffing your clothes,' he begins, voice sharp as a dulled knife.

'I was talking about the thing where you took my bullet.' One of Jack's hands reaches out then, and tries to touch Ianto's chest, where the Xilobytes had made their home, where the Hokrala Corp. had almost succeeded in killing _someone_ , if not whom they had been aiming for. He stops short.

It occurs to Ianto that _he_ almost died.

Huh.

Well.

'It wasn't as if I planned it,' he replies then, putting a hand on the washer and feeling the vibration jangle through his muscles and bones. His skin is a coaxial cable that holds the juice, as it were. 'It was completely accidental.' He blinks, wondering if an accident makes his death any less heroic. A fireman was still a hero when he died in a fire, regardless of whether or not he had a kitten in his hand when the house fell down around him.

'Not that,' he pauses, thinking of something to say about it. Something to say other than, "I'm Torchwood", because he can't say that anymore. Not after he and Gwen had gotten caned after Owen and Tosh had died and sat around his flat saying it as if they were saying, "I'm Batman."

And he refuses to believe that Torchwood is a death sentence, otherwise no one would ever sign on. And if they did then they were denialist morons, and since he had signed on, he didn't like to think that about himself. Syllogistic logic made him move to the next step, which would be, "If you are a denialist about this, then what else are you in denial about, fuckwad?"

'Not that I look forward to dying in your place.'

Jack bends past him and peeks into the lid's peephole to look at his soapy clothes. 'You can't, you know, die for me.' He winks, and it looks sad, a broken version of one of those dolls whose eyes close when they're tilted back. 'I can't even do that.'

Ianto blinks at him when he straightens again, just inches away. He smells like ozone and Daz. 'I was thinking,' Jack continues, 'I might just wear a latex body suit from the kink shop and I bet we could--'

Ianto knows that kissing him then will be a thrill, that it will hurt, but maybe it should. Maybe if it hurts when their lips meet and Jack's residual electricity stored in god-knows-where will be some sort of Frankenstein-ian jolt that Ianto can save inside himself, should he ever need to be brought back to life. That would be cracker. Though that might just mean that he was raised in the Nintendo era, and this fantasy of collecting lives and secreting them on the person is only a thing, not real.

There is a little jolt, a little shock, and his lips pause, just for a second, before he opens his mouth, and Jack plunges in, pressing his body against Ianto, closing a circuit. He leans back against the washer, his waist twitching with the stabilised shaking. And good that Jack's tongue is working against his, that their teeth clack and he heard Jack's little moan that means that he wants to have sex right here, and there's nothing stopping them, not really. Not even Ianto's secret mission of delving the mystery of Jack Harkness is more important right now, anyway. Kissing keeps him from divulging secrets of his own.

And the secret is that Ianto is scared to death. He's scared to death of his own death, which shall be soon, he feels. Soon relative to the context of Jack's life, but possibly not what he would call soon, or maybe what the Provencal would call _momentment_. Jack's hands pick at his tie like a baker plucking hot rolls from a pan -- staccato, worried.

Belt buckles are metal and zap at Jack's fingertips. The washer is enameled metal, not really an ideal ground for a little electric sex. The washing powder smell fills Ianto's nose when he lowers his head to Jack's neck, licking at the hollow behind the man's ear, something that always tastes like right and filth and everything he thinks is wonderful about the sweaty fucking they indulge in all over the Hub when no one sees. They're going to get dirty right here against Jack's rotating soapy whites.

'I missed your...' Jack says, and finishes his sentence with his hands, undoing Ianto's flies and stroking Ianto's cock through his shorts. 'Oh, yeah.'

Jack doesn't go down on him often, really. They like the _bam bam bam_ back-scraping nail-scratching of hard-fucking too much, but it's not unheard of. Ianto has forgotten how much he loves just the very thought of the back of Jack's tongue on the underside of his dick. It's like art. It's like precision and prayer and watching an eclipse through the pinprick hole in a homemade viewer.

Jack's tongue is like dodging a Keshkali gas fletchette and knowing that would have been the end. His eyes rolled up to watch are like hitting the sides of an elevator as it zooms down the shaft and away from danger. The close of his eyes and the sweep of lashes are like falling, falling into anything, a place, a thing, an idea, into love.

Jack's mouth lowers to Ianto's cock and he braces himself, the rocking of the washer's rotating body jostling him just enough that when lips seal around the head of his shaft he isn't sure whether it's the movement or the jolt of electricity that makes him thrust up. Jack smiles around him, taking in more, hands gripping Ianto's thighs. When he moans and the back of his tongue laves Ianto's cock, there's a small prick of electricity, and Ianto jerks. Jack's hands steady him and he moans around Ianto's cock, the vibrations and the shocks sending something like _paingoodowpainowohyeslikethatpainohdon'tstopraspandohpainandohmygod_ and how clichéd is that? he thinks, reduced to fore and hind brain battling like a bad comic strip come to life.

Ianto can feel the heat of the washer on his bare arse, and Jack's fingertips pressing into his flesh. His hands reach out and grab Jack's hair, but he keeps looking at the wall in front of him, too frightened to close his eyes. Jack's teeth scrape in the back of his mouth, his tongue works around Ianto's cock intermittently, and all Ianto can think now is what he sees in faded white block letters in front of him: 'Keep Calm and Carry On'.

Keep calm and don't worry about decay.

Keep calm and don't say anything about the visions of pallbearers dancing in your head.

Come loudly and thrust violently.

Unearth and dig deeper.

Give up and fall in love.

Later, when they are tidy and dressed and up in the Hub proper, Gwen suggests that he and Jack take the afternoon and go out for something substantial to eat. He's about to protest when she cocks her head and tells him that she can take care of the Hub by herself for two hours or so.

'But--' he protests and then stops when she raises an eyebrow.

'I'm Torchwood,' she tells him.

His coat hits him in the face.

***

They don't talk about it, then, and Ianto figures that it's buried. They're both above ground, literally and figuratively. Sometimes he wonders if Jack doesn't stand on roofs because he spends so much of his time under the earth, and then his head swims with Toshian analogies that equal the multiplication of negative numbers into a positive.

But the subject, pretty much like the man across from Ianto inhaling a lamb burger with raita and cucumbers, never really stays buried, never really stays dead.

'Look,' Jack says around a mouthful of food. He gestures with the burger and a cucumber wedge flies behind him to land in the empty chair at the next table over. Ianto listens to the rain on the window and stabs his chips into the ketchup pit he has excavated on his plate. 'You have to remember that you can't jump in front of me.'

Ianto blinks. 'I didn't.'

Jack shrugs, light, as if he's throwing off something sticky. 'Okay, that's beside the point. Circumstances like this just remind me to remind you. And Gwen,' he adds as an afterthought.

These chips are fantastic. Ianto throws himself into them, telling himself that they're just really good today, and it's not because this is the first time he's had chips since, well, since. He's reminded of the man on the ledge with the tiger above and the gorge below, and how he eats a strawberry, and the point of the story is that the strawberry was fantastic, not any of the other stuff. He gets that intrinsically now, and not just in an A level way.

Jack sighs and stares at the poster on the wall next to them, then the floor, then the menu on the wall behind Ianto, his eyes moving like he's reading, but Ianto knows he isn't. The waitress and counter girl glance in their direction; he's long given up wondering what the reason is for their staring. It could be any number of things, and probably not even close to the one he's thinking of.

Jack shoves the last of the burger in his mouth and slaps the napkin to his mouth like he's chloroforming himself, then draws it down; apparently he's learnt table manners from a three-year-old.

'How many times?' Ianto asks suddenly as Jack sits back in the rickety chair.

'How many times what?'

'How many times have you died?'

Jack reaches out and unscrews the cap from the salt shaker and upends it all over the table. Ianto watches the salt pour out in a pile while Jack runs his hands through it, smoothing it out into a small lake. The waitress is going to hate them.

'That was nice,' Ianto says around a wad of chips. Jack still has ketchup in the corner of his mouth. Ianto doesn't say anything because they're in the middle of something, but it reminds him too much of blood. Blood on Jack means less than it does on others, though.

Jack smiles. 'Count the salt.'

'Oh, that's rich.'

'Can you?'

Ianto shrugs. 'You've made your point.'

Jack stares at the salt. 'I bet it's not as much as all that,' he ruminates. 'The point is that you _can_ count, but why would you want to? '

The rain lashes the window next to them, like they're in an automated car wash. Rain doesn't clean anything well these days, except to the naked eye. 'I get it,' Ianto says solemnly.

The waitress is giving them the evil eye, and he feels bad. Jack doesn't even notice, not because his back is to her, but because he's not looking at her. He's staring at the pile of salt. 'I don't think I do.'

Before they leave, Ianto uses his serviette to wipe all of the salt off the table and onto his plate. Jack watches from the door as Ianto wipes every last granule onto his plate with care, examining the formica surface for anything left over, and then places his serviette carefully over the plate, both to cover the waste from the casual eye and to keep any of it from blowing away with the slight breeze from the A/C .

'Thank you,' Jack says, when Ianto joins him at the door. 'I had forgotten.'

Ianto wants to touch him, but he doesn't. He wonders what shock he would receive. 'I'll always remember for you.'

END


End file.
